Bring the House Down by Charlotte Runcie

Published by Doubleday on July 8, 2025

Bring the House Down explores several themes. Infidelity in marriage is one: why it happens and how couples talk about it (or don’t). A related theme is how we become the people we become.

Another theme is the concept of using another person. When is it unethical? When is it not so bad? Does it matter whether the other person agrees to be used? What disclosures should be made before the using commences? Does being used justify revenge?

A less important theme is the artist’s need to be admired. For some artists, there is no other purpose for the creation of art. “Everyone desperate for people to like what they’ve made. We’re all still children, wanting our parents to look at the picture we’ve drawn. We never grow out of that feeling.” To an extent, the theme broadens into the need most people feel to be liked or desired or appreciated. And it branches into a theme about the reviewer’s purpose.

The novel’s two primary characters are reviewers. Alex Lyons is in his early thirties. Alex is a theater reviewer for an esteemed London newspaper. His mother was a prominent actress but his own career in theater ended when his first audition exposed his lack of talent.

Women fall for Alex and he takes advantage of their infatuation to grow his body count. Alex “recently resolved to stop sleeping with women under the age of twenty-four after one of them told him he looked like ‘such a softboi, but old,’ and it was like being insulted in an entirely different language.”

Alex travels to an arts festival in Edenborough with Sophie Rigden, a junior writer on the paper’s culture desk. Sophie reviews art projects that aren’t sufficiently important to be assigned to a senior reviewer. The paper has booked Alex and Sophie into the same multi-bedroom flat it always leases for the festival, inertia explaining why the flat is so large despite the paper having reduced the number of reviewers it sends.

Alex attends a one-person performance by Hayley Sinclair, a self-important performer who thinks that delivering a monolog about global warming is art. Alex writes his usual scathing review. After emailing it to his editor, he goes to a bar, where he encounters Hayley. She’s an attractive woman in her mid-twenties and a bit buzzed from the mix of performance and alcohol, so he takes her back to the flat and shags her.

The next morning, despite Sophie’s attempt to hide it from her, Hayley she sees the review, connects it (with Sophie’s inadvertent help) to Alex, and departs in a state of unhappiness. Alex is untroubled by her angry exit. As Sophie explains, Alex expects this “to become a good war story to tell our colleagues back in the newsroom in London.”

Alex should know it’s rude to shag a person you’ve just condemned in a review, at least without making full disclosure of your identity and what you’ve written before the shagging commences, but allowing the wrong head to do the thinking is a common male fault. In fact, Alex believes that what he did was wrong but not that wrong, given that she wanted to have sex with him and enjoyed the experience.

Karma strikes when Hayley changes the name of her show to The Alex Lyons Experience and turns it into a confessional about, yes, her experience with Alex. She reads the review aloud and inserts her editorial opinions about the reviewer who used her for sex after disrespecting her artistic message.

Hayley’s call upon theatergoers to spread her story goes viral. By coincidence, the last woman Alex dated, another actress, is in Edenborough. Alex didn’t review her show but included it in a year-end listing of the year’s ten worst plays just before he ghosted her. The actress attends Hayley’s performance, tells Hayley about her experience with Alex, and the one-woman show becomes a two-woman gripe session.

Women who are moved by Hayley’s show give her “me too” feedback “about being assaulted, raped, their birth traumas, their childhood abuse,” events are have nothing to do with the poor review that Alex gave Haley. Alex is an insensitive cad, but he didn’t force Haley to do anything against her will. It might have been more ethical to tell her that he had just written an unfavorable review of her performance, but it wouldn’t be fair to say he had sex with her under false pretenses. When they finished and she poured out her insecurities to him, he held her and made comforting noises about how he was sure the show would be a hit. That was a lie, but was he wrong to reassure her? If she didn’t take the time to learn anything about Alex before shagging him, is he to blame that she felt wounded when she read his review? That different readers will answer that question in different ways speaks to Charlotte Runcie’s success in crafting a story that examines misogyny in more depth, with more nuance, and from more perspectives, than novels typically manage.

The irony is that Hayley becomes successful by picking the right man to sleep with — hardly the road to fame that a feminist should want to take. She goes on to make The Alex Lyons Experience a nightly event. Her fifteen minutes of fame earns her interviews that bring her version of art to a wider audience — success she never would have achieved by keeping her pants on.

During her new show, Hayley proclaims “Alex Lyons isn’t just one guy. He’s every guy. He symbolises this whole business, this whole rotten media that keeps us down and stops us from making art that reaches people.” That’s a lot to put on Alex, who didn’t stop Haley from doing anything.

The rest of the novel follows Alex’s decline (the paper isn’t entirely pleased with the adverse publicity) and Sophie’s commensurate rise. As pennance, Alex is assigned to interview Hayley (the paper undoubtedly hopes he might bring himself to apologize during the interview) but he can’t bring herself to do it, so the task falls to Sophie. This leads to a climactic scene in which Sophie finally confronts Alex, who weakly defends himself before dramatic circumstances bring their very public discussion to a halt.

The novel fills in details of Sophie’s backstory, including her troubled relationship with her husband, who is caring for their son (a job that seems to make Sophie envious) while she is in Edenborough. I give Runcie credit for making clear that Sophie and her husband each have legitimate grievances about the other. Their largest problem is that they haven’t taken the time to listen to each other. Alex also has a recent ex who, although one of many, surfaces to play a role in Sophie’s revenge tour.

Portraying complex issues from multiple perspectives while reserving judgment is the novel’s strength. Hayley seems a bit artificial to me, although I admit that I don’t know any twenty-something artists who take themselves too seriously, so perhaps the novel is an accurate portrayal of the type. In any event, Bring the House Down tells an engaging story and raises interesting questions about interpersonal relations, including gendered differences in attitudes about mindless shagging, that are worth pondering.

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